


sweet sixteen

by stag_von_simp



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Birthday, Everyone Who Isn't Lysithea Is A Very Minor Character, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Oneshot, Pre-Time Skip, just be warned XD, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-22 11:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22948777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stag_von_simp/pseuds/stag_von_simp
Summary: lysithea, despite her expectations, has a very sweet sixteen.
Relationships: Cyril & Lysithea von Ordelia, Lysithea von Ordelia & Claude von Riegan, Lysithea von Ordelia & Hilda Valentine Goneril
Kudos: 14





	sweet sixteen

She shuffles into the library trying to feel no different than she does any other day. Sure, there’s a tickle, an  _ itch  _ at the base of her gut that makes her want to gag or giggle or settle for some horrific median of the two--that knowledge that it’s her birthday, and if she would just admit it she could be tearing a cake apart by the chunk and forgetting to care about any icing that may dapple her face.

No no  _ no.  _ She scolds her mind into silence. How dare she let herself be thrust into some great chase with her childish wishes for acknowledgement? How dare she scamper after any fantasy when there’s work to be done?

She weaves through the bookshelves, tugging the volume she needs to study today free from its cramped hell among the other volumes for other, less-special days. Then, she plunks down at a table tucked comfortably in a corner and tries to squash the fact that she cares about what should be her sweet sixteen. 

The  _ sweet  _ of the ordeal is nowhere to be seen. How she wishes her tongue were coated with the lingering, sickly sweetness of a birthday cake, captured in a cage of frosting, swiped on and on again until none of the cake--the heart of the delicacy--was even visible. She loves the appeal of having to shovel through forests of what she’ll accept (frosting by the mound) to unearth what it is she truly wants (the cake itself, stripped of pretense and flamboyance). If eating cake can be transformed into an expedition, her victory will taste impossibly sweeter.

A smile writhes on her lips. Lysithea doesn’t bother to heed it; she only blusters a sigh and scrubs her mind clean of yearning, shrinking closer to her book.

(The book tastes of nothing. The book leaves her absolutely hollow, so every bit of her quivers with desire, audibly humming at even the thought of that greedy, gluttonous word.

_ Cake. _

She can barely gulp back her swoon.)

Guilt lodges in her system, but it doesn’t hush her hunger like she hoped it would. Lysithea huffs another sigh through her nose, burns her focus yet again to the words she needs to be digesting--swallowing--savoring-- _ stop it.  _ She really needs to stop hoping for things--

She’s ripped from her lamenting by a decisive clatter. It’s really more of a scrape than a clatter--what she supposes is metal meets the wood of the table, but Lysithea barely bothers flickering her eyes up to identify the disturbance before jerking her gaze back to the stacks upon stacks of tiny, uniform words, boring as ants trudging in lines toward a mundane destination--

But then she starts, her eyes abandoning the book entirely to dart right back to what had formerly been nothing more than a disturbance.

Turns out, the  _ disturbance  _ is actually a  _ gift.  _

Cyril of all people loiters at the opposite end of the table. His hands are bundled sloppily together behind his back, and he’s barely able to waft away his grin. Eventually, he succumbs, and his teeth fringe out to peer at her from under his lip. “Happy birthday,” he says.

And that is what turns her sweet sixteen into an  _ embarrassingly perfect _ sixteen.

Because there’s something towering between Cyril and Lysithea, and that something is a  _ cake _ , wobbling with its height, dwarfing the platter it’s on and the table  _ that _ is on and the library that table wastes away in and, most of all, Lysithea herself.

(It’s not the cake that makes her heart swell and her shoulders fold, it’s the kindness, but she’s unaware of this until years later, reflecting on this moment, too busy piercing every shadow of her hopeless future with her smile.)

“Cyril…” She hates the way her voice trembles with searing fervor, but her gratitude smolders impossibly, deafeningly brighter. “Just how many tiers are there?”

“T-Tiers?” Cyril cuts a glance over his shoulder, and then  _ Hilda  _ of all people springs into Lysithea’s awareness.

“Eight,” Hilda reports. “Eight tiers. Vanilla. You have no idea how long Claude kept us all in the kitchen last night. Let me tell you, baking this baby was  _ torture.  _ I’d literally only do that much work for a friend like you, Lys.”

“And you still manage to moan about it,” Lysithea sneers--say whatever she wants, she knows her thanks is scrawled in the clouds of crimson puffing in her cheeks. She knows it’s glowing in each tear that burrows into the corners of her eyes.

(Not that she’s about to let the tears venture down her face. She could  _ never, never ever  _ do such a thing, no matter how touched she is.)

“If you think that’s bad,” Claude pipes up, shrugging his way to Hilda’s side--he’s always at Hilda’s side, but the smile on his face is all-genuine, and all for Lysithea, “then you should’ve heard her last night. Groaning every time I made her run to get a new measuring cup.”

“Yeah, of course I’d complain, since you were making me do  _ way  _ more than the others,” Hilda bites back, and Claude just tips his head back and laughs.

Just then, Raphael decides to gallop into view. Lysithea’s beginning to suspect the entirety of her House is cowering somewhere in this library, just waiting to lunge into relevance and humiliate her with their kindness. 

“Well, are we gonna cut this thing or not?” he asks. “Leonie’s got her knife!”

Claude rolls his eyes affectionately. “Leonie’s always got her knife. Well, you ready, Lysithea?” She feels herself quake with the force of her nod, and forgets to rue being so forward--no, she can wait until later to agonize over that. “But first...Lorenz. Set some little fires, won’t you?”

Lorenz creeps out from behind a different shelf than Raphael. Just  _ how  _ precisely are they positioned? Lysithea has to cushion her face in her fingers; she has to steal a private moment just to feel a bit too warm about all this. 

“If you insist on wording it so crudely, then I may have to be petulant about it,” Lorenz snaps before obediently fluttering his fingers. Candles she hadn’t even noticed staked within the cake blink awake. “Nonetheless, blow them out, Lysithea.”

“And hurry up,” Leonie calls. “I’m ready to put this knife to good use.”

“Guys, I’m not a child,” Lysithea mutters from behind her hands. Slowly, she lets them droop to the table. Her book has been shoved aside, and it couldn’t be further from her mind. “I have no reason to blow at candles and wish for futile, superficial things.”

Claude smirks. “Well then. Hilda, do you want to blow them out?”

Lysithea knows it’s a trap, yet she scrambles into it willingly, rushing to snuff every candle in a storm of breath before Hilda can even inhale in preparation. 

Here’s what she wishes for: that however many birthdays after this one she’s given, she’s able to spend them all with Cyril and Claude and Hilda and everyone else.

(Even if they force her to nod along to their terrible, horrible, endearing rendition of "Happy Birthday.")

**Author's Note:**

> i know the chances of blowing out candles and singing "happy birthday" being customary in fodlan are about a million to one, but you know what?? i had fun with this, so there's no need to take it too seriously XD
> 
> i hope you all enjoyed it!!!


End file.
